The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 13 May 2010

A Guardian transcript gave this as Alastair Campbell's parting line to the political editor of Sky News, Adam Boulton, during a television encounter this week: "Adam you are a pompous little arse." From further listening to this near-inaudible endpiece, it now appears that Mr Campbell's words were: "Adam you are as pompous as it gets".

Many a cultural allusion has been made in recent weeks by journalists seeking to give some structure to what we former English A-level students call a freeform narrative of an election. On Monday, Jonathan Freedland listed the Shakespearean heroes that make up the tragic figure of Gordon Brown. Now I shall lob my own cultural allusion on to the cerebral pile and say: Holy bejeezus, it's all gone a bit Anchorman, hasn't it?

If you haven't seen Anchorman, you are clearly a loser. Sorry, I meant, if you haven't seen Anchorman, I shall explain. This film tells the story of a well-known news anchor called Ron Burgundy. Ron is a deeply vain man. Yet, with the tragic self-destructiveness of a Shakespearean figure, he nearly loses everything due to an "unfortunate incident" on air.

Which – with the smoothness that TV news is known for – brings us to Adam Boulton, Sky News's highly branded anchor. Boulton's face is usually set to "self-satisfied" mode, but on Monday it turned an even deeper shade of Burgundy than usual during his now notorious exchange with Alastair Campbell. "Don't keep casting aspersions on what I do or don't think!" Boulton bleated, his voice cracking. As Professor Freud once said: "Das Voicecrackingus ist eine sure sign zat von ist losing das plot."

Just to show how relevant Freudian theory still is, Boulton then screeched, outta pretty much nowheresville, "I actually love this country!" Campbell promptly informed him, "Adam, you are a pompous little arse" – making this surely the first time viewers have ever come away from an exchange involving Campbell thinking: "You know, that Alastair speaks plain, honest sense."

Boulton, incredibly, was not then bundled off home by his colleagues, making collective sympathetic noises to his face while rolling their eyes behind his back. Rather, he was still on air five hours later, a Raging Boul charging through the fragile china Labour cabinet. He redeployed his weapons of choice, a jabbing finger and purple face, and shouted at Ben Bradshaw, "Now listen, I'm not going to take this from you!"

Doubtless in his head, Boulton was Howard Beale from the 1976 film Network, shouting, "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!" To everyone outside of his head, he sounded like Ron Burgundy, bleating, "I am a man. I am an anchorman!" To confirm this, Bradshaw later tweeted "and off air after he said: 'Don't you DARE talk to me like that!' What is wrong with him?" My dear Ben, nothing is wrong with him – he is a newshand.

Boulton is not the only newshand to have had a recent meltdown. His colleague Kay Burley, always reliable for, shall we say, impassioned behaviour, conducted what has been described as an "overly aggressive" interview with that famously threatening sort of interviewee, a director of a campaign group protesting for reform of the voting system. "Why don't you go home and watch it on Sky News?" Burley spat at him, taking Sky News's famous love of self-promotion to a whole new level: stop making news, people, and just go home and watch us, sneering at you.

By the time Jeremy Paxman told viewers at 6.30 in the evening that the whole country had "made such a bollocks of the simple act of putting an 'x' on a piece of paper", he sounded so harmless he could have been a host on CBeebies.

Some might say that this is the inevitable fallout of having not just rolling news, but newscasters who find some sort of machismo in taking out and waggling their tally of hours on air to see whose is the highest. Boulton boasted to the Guardian on Monday that he'd done "10 hours in the anchor chair, two hours' sleep and back live outside No 10" – yes, Adam, and then you behaved like a big baby.

Regarding Burley and Boulton, many viewers and plenty of Labour MPs are crying Tory bias from the Murdoch-funded Sky. But this doesn't hold up in the case of Burley, who wields her fury against all worthy targets, from Peter Andre (whom she made cry this year) to the wife of a serial killer whom she once asked: "Do you think you'd have had a better sex life if he hadn't done this?"

Another possibility is that the shadow of Paxman hangs heavy over British broadcasting, making them all mistake "egomaniacal haranguing" for "professional probing".

But I don't think any of these accusations are right. You see, I love newshands. I love their artificial conventions, their pride in their whizzy graphics, their fake bonhomie. They are light entertainment with pretensions of political importance, and the inner-diva qualities that are a requisite for anyone who wants to be on TV that much have simply been waiting for the perfect conditions in which to erupt like an Icelandic volcano. A dragged-out election with 24-hour news coverage, for instance.

If the election has felt like The Thick of It writ large, then the TV newshands have shown how spot-on Network, Broadcast News, The Day Today and, most of all, Anchorman really are. All I needed for this election to be perfect was for Lorraine Kelly to wrap her hands around Sarah Brown's throat and cry: "Say something interesting, woman! This is LK Today, for chrissakes!" As Ron Burgundy would say: stay classy, Planet Earth.